PROFILE: Laguna Beach actress Jonelle Allen plays the first black female role in a prime-time Western.. To catch up with Laguna Beach actress Jonelle Allen, it is necessary to saddle up. Allen is taking riding lessons in San Juan Capistrano to train for her role as Grace in the CBS show, "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," a Western. "Yippy-ti-yi yo-o-o-o, get along little doggie yippy ti-yi-yooooo," Allen wails as her horse, Trigger, [no relation to the already-stuffed], breaks into a canter, leaving its quarter-horse companion, Count du Montie, and this writer in the dust.

"Can you imagine? I'm from New York City, and I'm, like, yahoo!" Allen yells from across the arena.

"Don't get too cocky, girl," says her instructor, Dana Smith. "Bring your legs up underneath him. Get your body balanced."

"This and thighmaster and I'll be able to crack walnuts," Allen says, as Trigger lurches forward, flushing a flock of sparrows from the trees. Allen hesitated only briefly a few months ago when she was asked to participate in a small cattle drive for "Dr. Quinn." The director had called upon Allen's stunt double, only to find that the double couldn't ride. "They couldn't find any black stunt women who rode horses, which I found amazing." Allen said. "But then, I'm the first African-American woman, who has a prime-time role in a Western."

Allen told the director she felt confident she could ride. "As I got on the horse, they said, 'You can ride this now, right, Jonelle?' I'm like, 'Oh, yes, I can ride!" Allen managed to stay on her horse throughout the filming, She also stayed on through several months of lessons.

"But wouldn't you know it?" she says. "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous wanted me at the stables riding, and that's when I decided to fall off of the horse!"

Allen's character, Grace, doesn't ride often: she's too busy running a thriving cafe. Grace is an emancipated slave who moved to Colorado after the Civil War. Allen winced when asked if a black woman in a Western isn't a tad too P.C.

"'Politically correct' has come to mean some ultraliberal bleeding-heart thing," Allen says. "But to me, it means people have done their homework -- that they know their history accurately, and they're representing what actually happened in the Old West. A lot of the cowboys were black. There were whole black communities in the West."

Her most challenging role in her two years on "Dr. Quinn" came last year during an episode about the Ku Klux Klan. But the scene she most filmed, for a February air date, has Grace confronting her infertility. The drama draws on all of Allen's inner resources.

The rain has just subsided on the set of "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" at the Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, and Allen, coffee pot in one hand, strides beneath a large, spreading oak, her long petticoats dragging in the mud.

Her character, Grace, has been married a year and still has no child. Grace serves two customers at the cafe, one a young pregnant woman, Grace listens to them talk about the unborn baby. Allen has next to no dialogue in this scene, but she must carry the lead, the camera training on her mercilessly. Her face registers anger, anxiety, jealousy and sadness.

"There's not a single sight more beautiful than a baby. It means all's right with the world," the woman says.

"Cut!" the director yells. "Let's do that turn again."

Allen must capture the look -- the complexity of emotions four times over, consistently. Actor Joe Lando, the heartthrob who plays Sully, says he marvels at her ability to do so much with so little dialogue.

"She's one of the best actresses in the world," he says. "No matter what she has to do -- if it's two words -- she will bring something to that part. I watch her and I think: "How does she do it?"

Coming off the set, Allen's eyes brighten with tears. "That really got intense," she says to the show's writer, Kathryn Ford. "It didn't just touch Grace. It touched Jonelle as well."

"It's coming from that place in me, too," Ford says.

"I've had three days of gutwrenching stuff," says Allen, collapsing on the porch of a mock saloon. "The situation might not always pertain to my life, but to bring about the emotions, I have to tap into some personal, private things."

In this case, infertility has never been a big issue for Allen. She never had children. She had a miscarriage. But she has neither regrets about not having kids nor worries about her time running out. To bring about the emotion required for Grace, Allen has to draw on other experiences in her own life. She has no shortage of these.

"In the last three years, I've gone through a divorce, the death of my grandmother, and the death of my aunt, who was like a mom to me," Allen says. "So there's been a lot of loss. A lot of loss. I think, though, that because all these things have happened, I'm able to bring a real depth of emotion to Grace."

Allen sometimes finds that she's become her role -- she takes her character around with her in Laguna Beach, unable to shake the persona. Her character in her last big role, Doreen in the former NBC soap opera "Generations," got divorced about the same time Allen got divorced from her husband, chef John Sharpe.

"I had expectations that when you got married, you stayed married," Allen says. "I came into marriage with all sorts of ideas from the movies. You see a love story, and at the end of it, they got behind their white picket fences and live happily. But, if you stay for the credits at the end of the movie, you see how many people it took to put that movie together. It's the same in life. It takes a lot of work."

Through all the difficulties, she was working on staying sober. "Alcoholism is a disease, and I'm predisposed to it," she says. "It affects a lot of people who are creatively bent, because it's about feelings. Your feelings become overwhelming, and you want to shut it off."

She takes a deep breath of clear, after-the-rain air.

"I'll tell you something," she says, "being out here on location has given me a sense of spirituality. You're in the wide open space all day. Usually, you're working in a dark studio. I call it the Las Vegas condition. It's one day all day long. Here you just a sense of being one with the elements, with nature."

Tourists are allowed on the se, and Lola Straub of Santa Maria comes up and touches Allen on the arm.

"Hi," Allen says. "I play Grace. My name is Jonelle."

"No, your name is Grace," Straub says. "You'll always be Grace to me. Isn't it funny how you can become a part of our lives?"

"Well," Allen says, "it's nice to be on a show long enough that you can become part of someone's life."

Allen says the show is free enough that she has been able to bring to Grace her own personality, including a sense of humor.

"Grace also loves her money," Allen says. "She has her money pouch with her everywhere she goes. She's never very far from her dough. Is that Grace or Jonelle? I don't know."

Allen says she has not experienced the difficulties by many actresses 40 or older. "There comes a time when you can't play Gidget anymore," she says. "That's the reality."

Although Allen went without work in her teens because she couldn't find roles for black teenagers, she said she has never felt discrimination -- in part because she aggressively makes her own roles and refuses to play any one type.

A part for a savvy, brilliant attorney in the TV movie "Penalty Phase" with Peter Strauss was written for a white male. Allen tried out anyway and got the part. She was cast as Shari Belafonte Harper's great-great-great grandmother on a recent "Midnight Hour" and played a teenage lesbian in a movie of the week, "Cage Without A Key."

She gets exasperated with questions about discrimination, in part because she follows the tenets of the Church of Religious Science. "It's not a case of my living in la-la land," she says. "But, if you start believing that negative stuff, then you're going to manifest it. I'd rather look at people who do work and ask: Why do they work?"

Allen started defying the odds early, growing up in Harlem, although her home was in the higher-rent section, Sugar Hill. Her mother, who had a job at the Post Office, provided a role model of a working woman. Her neighbors were Duke Ellington and the Mills Brothers. At 3, she took dance lessons and was scouted by a talent agent for a part on Broadway.

She says she wasn't pushed into acting.

"It wasn't like I had these stage parents pushing me and forcing me to go on the stage when I wanted to skip rope," she says. "I loved it."

At 5, Allen played Little Miss Lucy to Helen Hayes' Miss Lucy in the 1956 revival "The Wisteria Trees." Hayes told Allen's mother to encourage her acting. Sixteen years later, on the sidewalk outside Sardi's on opening night of Joseph Papp's "Two Gentlemen of Verona," Allen spotted Hayes. Hayes had attended "Two Gentlemen" that night.

"Oh, Miss Hayes," Allen said, reaching the first lady of theater just as she was climbing into her cab, "you probably don't remember me. But, I acted with you when I was 5. You told my mother to keep me in the theater because I had this natural gift."

Hayes turned from the cab door and smiled at Allen.

"Well!" Hayes said. "I was right."

That year, Allen was nominated for a Tony Award for "Two Gentleman," and she won the Drama Critics Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Theater World Award and the Outer Critics Circle Award.

She enjoys her work on "Dr. Quinn" so much that she thinks she could play her part as long as the show lasts.

"The Western is our truest American art form," she says. "It shows a time when people had guts and courage, when people worked together and were close to each other. You got up and you worked, from sun up to sun down. You didn't need sleeping pills. You are tired. People worked with their hands. They built things. They had to have a lot of backbone and discipline, but they also had to have a joy for living.

"Something came up, they would have to deal with it immediately. They didn't have the luxury of having issues. They just dealt with life. They had to act on their feet; they had to act fast. These are people who were into action. And, I guess because it was a simpler time. I don't know that we all want a simpler time. But, I think we do want to become more basic in our thinking." [Orange County Register, Jan. 3, 1995: "Stereotypes Disappear in the Saddle."]

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